Charles
by jeviennis
Summary: Based on X-Men: First Class, but placed in X-Men: The Movie due to a lack of category. What happened if things on the beach had been left differently.


Charles

The missiles fell from the sky with a symphony of crashes and flashes, and on the ships surrounding the beach, valiant workers rejoiced as their lives were spared by Erik. Some things were just more important than conquest.

"Charles!"

Erik dropped to his knees beside his comrade, who shook with effort of keeping himself from crying out as the metal shot through his spine, over and over. Without so much as a backwards glance to the people he had been so intent on destroying, he pulled the bullet from Charles' back and turned his friend to face him. But the colour draining from his face told Erik that he was too late.

His hesitation was too much.

* * *

><p>"<em>They're just following orders!"<em>

"_I've been at the mercy of men just following orders; never again."_

_Charles flung himself towards Erik's outstretched arm as the missiles turned on their head and faced the troops in the sea – the innocent men who knew not of the cruelty of the human race. Erik pinned him to the floor easily, and there was a moment, just a tiny spec of a moment, when Charles saw the humanity drain from his friend's eyes. _

_Don't make me do this, Charles._

_Don't make me hurt you._

_They both knew he never would. Never could._

_That's why the bullet came as such a shock to the both of them. As Charles tried to stand, tried to reason again and talk some sense into the man he knew could be so good, one flick of the wrist and one tiny thought from an angry man sent him back down to the ground._

_What hit harder than the hit was the split second of emotion Charles found in Erik's mind as he fell. Anger, confusion and betrayal. Hurt. Terror._

_Charles had always been fascinated by the human mind, for obvious reasons. How far even someone without his powers could see into another person, just by thinking. How much potential everyone kept locked inside them, bound by the fear of rejection. How a single moment could flick through a directory of feelings in a person's very soul. _

_In the moment between pain and numbness, Charles knew that he'd found all the answers to his questions. Then he realised with a dull ache in his chest that great revelations come but once in a lifetime: before the end. _

_He was dying._

_From just a few feet away, he could see Erik turn and stare at him, just for a moment, letting the bombs drop. He almost smiled. _

_There's the man I knew._

_But at the look of horror etched on his ally's face, Charles knew that he was no longer the man he once pulled from a freezing cold sea in the dead of night. He didn't need to be a mind reader to see that._

_He was a man suddenly gripped by fear and by guilt, and by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. By the notion that the one thing – the one person – that had pulled him back from a road that deep down knew he should not have taken, was flickering and fading before his eyes._

_That scared Charles more than dying._

_Leaving Erik alone._

_And then, as if startled from the deepest reverie, Erik shook himself and tore over to where Charles lay, a shade of a man, a dark red stain already seeping onto the unspoilt beach underneath him._

* * *

><p>"You know I need you here Charles, you know I do. I need you to keep me on the right path because I know without you I'll stray, and I don't want to be that man again Charles, I don't. And I swear that if you please just stay here with me – with us – that I will never be that man again. I promise you, please. Just stay here, just keep with us. We're brothers, remember? Comrades in arms. Survivors. I know you are Charles, you're a fighter, just like me."<p>

Charles could only blink up at Erik as he felt himself gasping for air, sucking it in greedily in the hope that somewhere, floating around in the atoms, there would be a cure. That he wouldn't have to leave Erik or the others. That he wouldn't fail in what he'd tried so hard to establish.

He'd never failed anything in his life.

Not picking up girls, not passing his degree, not saving Erik from himself.

And now, here he was, lying helplessly as everything he'd ever built crumbled and joined the dust beneath his fingers.

The others stood on the other side of the sand dune, more afraid of seeing Charles so weak than they were of Erik so powerful. Tears tracked silently down cheeks as their mentor grew paler and paler, slumped further and further, disappeared faster and faster.

"Come on Charles, just stay with me, please. Hold on until we can get you safe, because I need you better. I need you by my side. We protect each other, you and me, and I don't think I can do this without you. Those kids – you're right, they are only kids – those kids need you, because they need to be taught that there are people who are as good as you in the world who will care for them, even when they feel more alone than ever. I've seen how heartless the world is, Charles, but I know that people like you can make it bearable for people like me and people like them. So please, for god's sake, please Charles, don't make me ask you again, just stay with me."

Charles' eyes shone with unshed tears that glittered under the midday sun as he gazed up at his brother for the last time, before his head bowed into Erik's chest and he was gone. It wasn't dramatic, like in the foreign films Erik had seen in France. It was quick and easy, as though Charles had fallen asleep without so much as a 'goodbye' or a 'see you in the morning'.

But it wasn't to Erik.

To Erik, it was as though someone had cut his heart from his chest and left a gaping void in its space, then filled the gap with razor blades and a sense of unending despair. Every breath hit his lungs like a punch to the chest and his throat ached with the sobs he knew that he would never let out. One glance to the youngsters on the dune told him that he wasn't alone in his feelings.

They were too young to be seeing this. They didn't deserve to.

Laying his friend on the floor, he saw that his eyes were still open. Once so vibrant, so alert, so _alive, _they gazed at flecks of nothing in the air above him, emotionless and hollow, more a shell of a man than Erik thought he'd ever see. With the lightest of pressure to Charles' eyelids, he pulled them shut over what the old wives' tales said would be the gateway to his soul.

Now Erik knew that there was no God, because there was no soul behind the stunning blue. There was just emptiness.

* * *

><p>The sun shone and the American people celebrated the avoidance of war with parties in the streets, while on a beach, among the wreckage of a lost cause, 9 people and two bodies were scattered in the dust, waiting for a salvation that none of them believed would ever come.<p> 


End file.
